Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [32]
Time and again, I have heard stories about how a third person destabilized the precarious balance of a close or best friendship. There is, sadly, no antidote to prevent its occurrence because friendships are dynamic, changing with the circumstances of our lives. But looking back at the friendship and talking about it helps us heal and learn.
MEAN GIRLS
Some of the cruelest betrayals occur when a clique of three or more female friends suddenly turn on one in their midst. This is extremely common during the middle and high school years, but it can inflict long-lasting scars that remain when these girls become women. Grown women also lament their exclusion from PTA committees and mom groups.
In middle and high school, the cafeteria is the most common backdrop for exclusion by the clique. Emily, now 20 years old, has vivid memories of the tears she shed when she became a lunchroom exile. Emily and her friend Marissa were on their way to lunch after math class during their sophomore year. While Emily was paying for lunch, she noticed that Marissa headed toward a table with a group of friends she was going to eat with. “They were my friends too,” says Emily.
Looking for a place to sit, Emily joined Marissa and the rest of the group but soon noticed there were no more chairs. “They had all decided to not save me a seat,” says Emily. She was stunned. “And I’m talking like these were people I knew since grade school, and all of a sudden I had no one to sit with.”
When Emily saw Marissa after school, she asked her what had gone down at lunch. Marissa lashed out and accused Emily of being too negative all the time and said that she had decided to surround herself with people who were more positive. Emily felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. “I spent every day in the library after that, and the friendship just went out the window,” says Emily. “I was depressed for months. It was like a part of me had died. I saw her with other people, having such a good time, and I always felt like I had let her down. It affected the rest of my high school career.”
Whether Emily really let Marissa down or not, Marissa was unnecessarily cruel in the very public way she handled the split (although common in the culture of middle school). She instigated their mutual friends to participate in the group dump of Emily, not realizing or caring how it would shatter her former friend.
At some point in their lives, many women suffer an indignity like this one that often goes on to affect their trust in future relationships. Another woman told me how her friend excluded her from a group in seventh grade. The two reconciled the next year and became good friends and remained very close into adulthood. “But I’ll be honest—to this day [some fifteen years later], when I’m mad at her about something else, I think back resentfully to how she shut me out at the lunch table,” she says.
Age is no barrier when it comes to one person being cast as the odd woman out. In a memorable episode of the HBO series The Sopranos, mobster Paulie Walnuts returns from prison and is shocked to find out that his mother has been excluded from the “girls” at Green Grove Nursing Home. When Paulie complains to the director of the facility, he responds, “Nursing homes are like high schools with wheel chairs.” Whatever your age, being dumped by one friend is awful, but being dumped by a group in public is humiliating. You not only wonder what your friend was thinking but what she told everyone else, and how you can face other people.
Meaningful